This paper is written as a master thesis with limitations regarding resources and time, and thus, there are areas within the field of consumer fairs that are not in focus in this thesis. As a result of the limited scope of this paper there exist a few limitations that will be highlighted in the following sections.
12.1 The topic
The overall topic of this thesis is consumer fairs for jewellery. Today, consumer fairs are predominantly held within areas such as travel, education, and cars, and not smaller, more exclusive sectors such as jewellery. Fairs often have a combination of public and professional visitors, and there does not exist many consumer fairs (only for the public) in Norway. Respondents in the surveys might therefore have little actual knowledge and experience with such fairs, and might find the subject to be irrelevant to them. This may affect their responses, as they do not have a relationship with what they are being asked about. Jewellery might still be perceived as “female products”, although more and more men take an interest in it. Respondents, and then especially men, might perceive jewellery fairs as unlikely for them to attend, which can influence their responses on questions regarding motives for attending. The results from the final study can to some extent be transferred to consumer fairs for other industries, however responses might be different if studying areas that reach the interests of a broader spectre of consumers, such as travel or sports.
12.2 Respondents and research design
When conducting a quantitative study it is desirable to generalize the results so that they apply to the entire population under consideration. The population in this study is consumers, however because I chose a convenience sampling for the quantitative studies, I can only generalize the results to populations that resemble the students at NHH. The use of convenience sampling limits the external validity. The results of the studies might be a good indicator of which factors that influences consumers, although I expect significant factors to differ amongst other consumer segments. Students as a group are very similar to each other, especially when conducting research amongst students at the same college. I did not ask for age, however it can be assumed that the majority of respondents are between 19 and 26 years
of age. Students usually have a fairly tight economy. Although some have part-time jobs besides school, I assume that the majority of the respondents do not have large incomes, and thus not a large amount of money to spend on jewellery. This might influence their choices, the relevance of the topic, and which factors that motivate them to visit a consumer fair for jewellery. The significant factors that influence attitude and intention are marketing of the fair and the influence and initiative of peers. Students are preoccupied with what other people do, and maybe more influenced by friends and family, than older consumers. It is reasonable to believe that the same study conducted amongst 40-60-year old consumers would yield different outcomes regarding which factors that influence to visit. Although a consumer fair for jewellery targets all consumers, the core target group is comprised of consumers with steady incomes, and with a large interest in precious gems and stones, hence maybe not your average student. Because no studies have been conducted on consumer fairs for jewellery in the past, this research can inspire others to conduct a similar study on other consumer segments. This can elucidate differences between consumer segments.
The results from the study might be generic for the consumer segment of this thesis. Stated differently, these results may be transferred to other industries. Whether it is a jewellery fair or a travel fair one is studying, results might show that consumers from this consumer segment are influenced by the same factors, which increases external validity. This is highly hypothetical at this point; however further research with focus on a different industry can make such conclusions in the case where results prove to be similar to those of this study.
As a result of no previous studies on the topic of consumer fairs for jewellery it was necessary to develop an instrument for measurements for the purpose of this study. Only a few research questions was directly adopted from other studies, while the rest was either based on the qualitative study or defined based on the theoretical discussion. Questions that have been applied in the past increase the face validity of the questionnaire. Even though some measures, such as those of attitude, intention, and past behaviour was adopted from other studies, they have never been used together with the other measures in this study, and therefore this instrument is completely novel. Because most measures have not been tested before, it is hard to assess their validity prior to the study. Even though the results from the pre-test proved positive, there are room for improvements in the future. A few of the constructs are only measured using two questions, while three or four questions for each construct would increase the reliability of the instrument. On the other hand, both validity and reliability of the measures are good. More extensive research could be conducted to find
questions that better measures the constructs. While this research tests some possible measures, a few questions were removed in the factor analysis. This may be a sign that they do not measure the same as the other questions for that construct, or that the question is phrased differently, and thus appear to measure something different. The factor called
“marketing of the fair” was originally comprised of four measures, however two of them were deleted in the factor analysis. This construct may not be fully measured by the remaining items, and it may be necessary to develop better measures for this construct.
Reliability for the remaining two measures is acceptable.
Experience proved to only influence the attitude of men, and not attitude of women or the intentions of either gender. This is a surprising result as consumer fairs are built on the idea of experiences. A limitation may be that one of the questions that measure the entertainment aspect of experiences is deleted in the factor analysis. This question is phrased differently from the two remaining questions, and reliability for the remaining two is good. Since the questions are developed for this study, and have never been used in prior research, the overall validity is lower and the questions might not capture the experience aspect as expected. It might be reasonable to split experience and entertainment into two factors in another study, as they might be just different enough to not be included in the same factor.
The factor “Accessibility and location” could also possibly be split into two factors in further research. It may be a limitation that these two constructs together make up one factor, however for this study the areas are greatly linked and therefore the decision was made to include them as one. Despite this, the factor did not prove to be significant which can be a result of too few measures for this factor to fully capture both areas.